TALP Research Center

23 Març - Visita de Donata Moers

Donata Moers is visiting us, as a part of the Erasmus lecturer-exchange program.

Donata is a lecturer at the former "IKP" (Wolfgang Hess) of the University of Bonn. At the same time, she is doing her PhD at the Bielefeld University with Petra Wagner being her supervisor.

You can meet Donata during this and next week at room D4-100.

Next Wednesday, she will give a talk about her PhD research topic.

In this presentation of my current work, I present a new approach to synthesizing fast speech in unit selection synthesis.

After recording two inventories - one at normal and one at fast speech rate articulated as accurately as possible - the natural speech first was perceptually evaluated and then automatically preprocessed. Afterwards, utterances were synthesized from both corpora independently. Since fast rate speech differs from normal rate speech in terms of acoustic characteristics, the concept of multi-phone (phoxsy) units (Breuer and Abresch, 2004) was implemented and used to synthesize speech at both speaking rates again. A perceptual evaluation showed that phoxsy units enhanced the intelligibility especially for fast synthetic speech significantly. To conclude with,the ongoing perception experiments investigating fast speech synthesized from the two different inventories and accelerated to varying speech rates with regard to intelligibility and overall speech quality are presented.